Feature request: material overrides (would be a de-facto workaround for other stuff!)

SFM1 has material overrides which allow the user to replace a model's material(s) by any other ones.

Giving us this option in SFM2 would be many birds with one stone, because, on top of the obvious benefits, it would allow to do some of the hackery that has been off-limits beforehand.

Here's the scenario I'm thinking of:

I have Queen of Pain in my scene. I want to fix her low-resolution textures because I wanna have close-up shots. Now, with material overrides, I can do this. But I also want to fix her horribly weightmapped fingers because I intend to have close-up shots on the hands.

I could set up two animation sets for the character; both would have a material override whose material has my new fancy high-res textures, BUT! The first would be on the original model, with the hands alphatest'd out, WHILE the second one would have my custom edit of the character that fixes her fingers, and this time, whose material override has everything but the hands alphatest'd out. And of course, the second animation set would be locked to the first.

In short, what I'm getting at is, material overrides would also allow us to replace only parts of models, something we cannot do in SFM2 because, unlike its Source 1 counterpart, it does not support per-bone scaling; not to mention all the other reasons. (we can't import facial animation controllers back in, etc)

Material overrides would give us a huge amount of flexibility in characters, offering an acceptable workaround to the fact that we can't edit base content!

I think we should also get material overrides so that changing minimal stuff doesnt require us to go through the absolutely horrible absolute pathing file system and guessing about hero shader variable values.